The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  Colour thrives in our world, but still black, with its ambiguous inflections, is king – as it is again in most fields of commercial design. For two or more decades now, IKEA has offered (along with white and scarlet goods) black armchairs, beds, bookshelves and bathmats. There is the all-black kitchen complete with black mixer-tap, high black stools and black clothes-pegs – all carefully appraised by customers who wear often black leather jackets, black baseball caps, black boots and carry black handbags or purses. Website advice on decorating the ultimate Bachelor Pad may note ‘the furniture is all black’, ‘there’s a wall that is entirely black’ and ‘the black floors are a really nice detail’. With ‘a large, black bed . . . the whole apartment seems very manly’ and ‘nothing complements a bachelor pad more than a nice big, black leather couch.’7 Hi-tech goods come often in black, from flat-screen televisions to laptops and BlackBerries. Black is economic for the manufacturer, since it is easy to mix carbon black (some form of soot) with molten plastic. In these designer goods we do not need to say that black plays with the dark side or alludes to death, mourning or the Christian Church. Rather black has become – more completely than before – the signature colour of smartness and style. Still it is serious: it says we are neither harlequins nor lightweights. And still black depends on contrast – on a companion item that is white or red or any colour – but the black has pride of place.

  In architecture too, in the second half of the twentieth century, the obsession with white abated. Le Corbusier might exclaim if he saw a contemporary kidney-shaped building covered entirely with plates of black glass; handrails and doorframes, when we go inside, may be of blackened aluminium. And when our buildings are black it is because we want black, for our synthetic black materials have a poor resistance to weather (as also does black marble – black granite is good). And unlike the dark skyscrapers, contemporary black architecture has caprice, with nothing of the mortuary. In 1989 Philippe Starck designed an all-black office block for the Japanese brewer Asahi (illus. 95). It stands beside the river in Tokyo, looking exactly like a gigantic, square, black-lacquered Japanese beer cup, its convex sides widening upwards. It is capped by a preposterous bronze shape like a carrot, which may represent beer froth blowing away. With less caprice, in 1999, part of the Royal Library of Denmark was rehoused in the Black Diamond Building in Copenhagen, designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen (illus. 96). Like Starck’s building it stands beside water so that, in spite of its apparent crushing weight – like the bottom, and heaviest, section of a pyramid – it seems to float or hover. And its huge but drastically simple bulk, on one side like the rampart of a fort, on the other like an overhanging cliff, recalls ancient structures. At the same time the two plain, skewed rectangles clad in black marble place it in the world of art after Malevich – the world of flat, abstract art one might say – though these black shapes resemble gigantic jet-black crystals, hence its name. In sum, it looks both like a bunker for future wars in the galaxy and like parts of the lower course of a ziggurat – which Herodotus said could be black. The glazed space between the crystals, with its glimpse of high bridges and people at leisure in a white interior, has its own light-reflectiveness, answering to the water.

  WITH SUCH POPULARITY in design, it is hardly surprising that black returned in visual art. Nor had black disappeared in the jouissance of modernism. In 1915 Kazimir Malevich painted his Black Square; when first exhibited, it was hung in the upper corner of the room, as is the practice in Russia with icons. I do not show it here because reproductions are so easy to see. Instead I show another of his works, where again his black rectangle has, as it were, an implacable visual force (illus. 97). The word ‘colour’ itself seems to have a different meaning when applied to the white background, which is light; to the blue triangle, where the colour is plain and close to the eye (though blue is often said to recede); and to the black oblong, which is enigmatic and at once opaque and unfathomable. There is both an affinity and a tension between the simple geometrical forms. One is reminded perhaps of the related roles which blue and black have had in Western imagery, with both being tied to spirituality so that the Virgin, from the Middle Ages on, has worn now black, now blue.

  Matisse, a virtuoso colourist, used black richly and with clear sensuality – even, for example, when making a linocut of a basket of begonias (illus. 98). And Picasso moved to black-and-white for his masterpiece, Guernica. The painting is a surreal nightmare, as if one switched on the light in one’s cellar and found a bullfight taking place, with a writhing horse hideously gored. But then everything is recessed by the drastic flat geometry, with textured areas reminiscent of newsprint, as though the artist chose to speak through mock news-photos (our language of sensation), saying: ‘Forget colour – something terrible is taking place here.’

  95 Philippe Starck, Asahi Beer Hall, Tokyo, 1989.

  96 Schmidt Hammer Lassen, The Royal Library in Copenhagen, 1999.

  97 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: Black Rectangle, Blue Triangle, 1915, oil on canvas.

  The use of black by the early modernists is however occasional. The case is different when we reach the mid-century. In 1949 Barnett Newman painted the large abstract Abraham, which he later claimed was ‘the first all-black painting’ in history. Actually Abraham is not ‘all-black’, since the thick black stripe which runs from top to bottom has a panel on either side of it of black mixed with green. The canvas is narrow, and at 6 feet 10 inches is just a little taller than a tall man would be. It is deeply dark and solemn, and, as commentators suggest, it may reflect Newman’s tragic feeling for his father – Abraham Newman – who had been ruined in the Great Depression and had died two years earlier. Newman himself spoke of the ‘tragic honesty of the first black painting’, and felt he had approached a dangerous, even terrifying, limit:

  Well, I was in the state of terror because what would happen – I never had black on black . . . Well, I finally made it black. And that moment was almost, I don’t know, it would be wrong to say that it was violent.

  Such a combination of terror and awe was associated, in earlier times, with the sublime.8

  Perhaps because, as he said, ‘the terror of it was intense’, Newman did not again paint an all-black (or nearly all-black) painting. And it was because he believed that Abraham was an ultimate moment in art that Newman became obsessive, in later years, in claiming Abraham as ‘the first and still the only black painting in history’.9 He was concerned when he heard, belatedly, of the Black on Black paintings which the Russian artist Aleksandr Rodchenko had made in 1918, and decided that Rodchenko’s dark tones were brown.

  98 Henri Matisse, Basket of Begonias I, 1938, linocut.

  Abraham did not remain the ‘only’ black painting. In 1951 Robert Rauschenberg produced an untitled abstract known as ‘Glossy Black Painting’. This was evidently not felt to be a serious challenge; nor did Rauschenberg stay with black. Newman was, however, infuriated, and attempted to sue for plagiarism when Ad Reinhardt began to produce black paintings in the early 1950s. Reinhardt certainly knew Newman’s work, since he had helped to hang Newman’s first exhibition – which included a black painting – at the Betty Parsons gallery in 1950. Newman’s criticism was a double one, since he accused Reinhardt both of derivativeness and of dilution – of producing blacks that were less than black: ‘There is a difference between a black with pigment that is black and an arrangement of pinkish, bluish “blacks” which ends up in grays.’10

  It is true that Reinhardt’s black paintings depend on the subtlest visual vibrations, as one tells the off-blacks from the blacks, discovering barely perceptible rectangles and residues of colour at a near-zero level of light. Reinhardt liked to quote the Japanese artist Hokusai, who said, ‘there is a black which is old and a black which is fresh . . . black in sunlight and black in shadow’. And Reinhardt did produce a darker black than Newman’s in the sense that he went to great lengths to remove sheen from his paint. He diluted the oil medium with vast quantities o
f thinner, then overpainted many layers on a canvas which rested flat on the table. The resulting paint surface was certainly matt, and extremely fragile. Reinhardt called his black paintings ‘useless, unmarketable . . . inexplicable’ icons, but he also called them ‘ultimate paintings’, ‘timeless, spaceless, changeless . . . aware of no thing but art’. At the same time, he kept to the human scale. He said his later, square black paintings should be ‘five feet wide, five feet high, as high as a man, as wide as a man’s outstretched arms’. He was interested in both Christian and Zen Buddhist mysticism, and in transcendence achieved through subtraction and negation. His lightless paintings are free of anguish: perhaps they do offer a visual Nirvana.11

  Nor was it only in New York that black reconquered canvas in the mid-twentieth century. In Paris, from the late 1940s on, Pierre Soulages used scarcely any other colour (his first works had been in dark walnut stain). His broad, black lines have thrust and attack; his constructions have a firm, upright stance. He himself distinguished ‘three ways of black’: the deep ‘black ground’ which sets off the lighter areas; the black surround which sets off small areas of strong colour; and ‘textural black’, where the paint surface is disturbed with an effect of energy.12 There is no surprise that the Senegal poet Léopold Senghor found in Soulages a kind of white Négritude, and welcomed Soulages’ marriage of Négritude with ‘la modernité’. Senghor organized a major exhibition of Soulages’ work in Dakar in 1974. The connection between modernist black and Africa is repeated, back in New York, in Robert Motherwell’s series of screenprints for the Africa Suite in the 1970s, where again the black forms – more curved and capricious than those of Soulages – seem a clear unloosing of pent-up visual energies. The same is true (mostly) of his Samurai series, as if his art were inspired by the connection he saw – or sought – between his explosive innovations and the impulse of ancient continents (illus. 99). His forms spring, they move, they seem filled with life, though the samurai also sparks with danger and has the foursquare firmness of Japanese kanji.

  99 Robert Motherwell, Samurai No. 4, 1974, acrylic on board.

  To return to Soulages, jet-blackness swallows ever more of his canvases through the 1960s and ’70s, until in 1979 he adopted the style he called Outrenoir (Ultrablack). His canvases now became black all over, with pale lines discernible where the paint has been combed. Outrenoir followed, however, the innovations of other artists. In 1960 Frank Stella had begun his own Black Paintings, in which bands of black house-paint – horizontal, vertical or diagonal – were separated by pinstripes of unpainted canvas. A similar style was practised, in the mid-1970s, by a less-known French painter, Jean Degottex. In his parallel black strips, in acrylic, not house-paint, there is a subtle play with the saturation of the paint which perhaps offers more to the dwelling eye than may be found in Stella’s hard stripes.13

  100 The Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas, 1965–6.

  With these near approaches to the truly all-black painting, we perhaps do come to the final step – along one path – which art may take. Black panels have been painted for two or three millennia: they often made the background, in Roman villas, to a small group of figures or plants. Again in the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci would set a calm young woman, or the Saviour of the World, against jet-black. Since his time, and that of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, jet-black has sometimes occupied most of the picture-space. It perhaps was inevitable that, in the course of time, the all-black field would advance and come to be the painting.

  Such an event may mark an epoch of art. To the questions it raises there is no one answer, for the ‘black paintings’ of different painters are, in effect, different answers. But perhaps the most signal event was the decision of Mark Rothko, in the mid-1960s, to devote himself entirely to blacks, deep browns and deep black-mauves in preparing the canvases for his Chapel in Houston, Texas (illus. 100). Though not uniformly black, they are known as his ‘black paintings’. Their effect is well described by James Elkins: ‘The paintings are like traps: harmless looking from a distance . . . But if you step too close to a Rothko, you may find yourself inside it.’ Elkins recalls the exhilaration of Rothko’s earlier, luminous canvases, paintings which ‘sweep forward, curling around you, filling the very air you breathe with color’. But Elkins finds the effect of the ‘black’ paintings more negative, and at the end of his first day in the chapel, Elkins records that he

  had given up because it was finally just too hard to take in so much darkness (whole walls of it), and too exhausting to play the game Rothko played, toying with a world of pure featureless black. It had felt a little dangerous, like playing at drowning.14

  A black question mark hangs, perhaps, over the black paintings of the twentieth century. Already they recede from us, being so closely tied to a particular elite, and so dependent on the spectator’s readiness to read in large-order significances. Nor were the Chapel pictures all painted by Rothko, whose second marriage was soon to fail, and who was depressed, seriously ill and exhausted: assistants worked under his direction, producing what he also called ‘something you don’t want to look at’. Elkins records that he did not weep in the Chapel, though many visitors do, and though he had expected that he might: he was then writing his book Painting and Tears.

  What does emerge, from many testimonies, is that the Chapel paintings are indeed black, not merely in their large-scale use of dark pigments, but also in the sense that covers dark experience – heartbreak, despair, misery, sterility. Rothko himself said his work addressed ‘basic human emotions . . . tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on’, far though such language is from the favoured idiom for the New York school, from Clement Greenberg’s celebration of the truly flat ‘picture plane’ and from the explicit concern of Reinhardt and Stella that their work should represent ‘no thing but art’.15

  The Chapel is not often discussed as a place for religious contemplation, though Rothko had intended it to be Roman Catholic. Not that the paintings show religious affirmation. Rather they seem the record of an abandonment for which the true remedy would need to be spiritual, though hope of such a remedy has died. Elkins calls the paintings ‘suffocating’.16 It may be that the actual masterpiece in Houston is the Chapel as a whole – this temple of lost faith, lost love, lost potency, and of life and its colours in the last stage of being lost – as the proof of an honesty in plumbing dispossession. The Chapel is not just a bench, on which one may sit in Zen tranquillity or have a comforting cry. It is a house of no escape: a place where desolation must be acknowledged, and in that sense a station on a pilgrimage. It was at that station that Rothko died, though we may not need to die there.

  AN ELEMENT IN Rothko’s depression – and in the disappointment of other notable black painters – was the sense that they had led art to a final high place, and art had not stayed there. On the contrary, already in the 1960s, the successors had landed. The flat plane of the abstract painting was replaced by paintings flat as an advertising hoarding: a giant Campbell’s Soup tin, stacked ranks of Coca-Cola bottles. Pop art had arrived. Andy Warhol guyed but relished supermarket modernity and made a screenprint of the same dollar bill replicated into a grey-green wall. True to his caprice, Warhol said (or is said to have said), ‘black is my favourite colour and white is my favourite colour’. He was liable to wear black and dye his hair white, and in his later Disaster series of screenprints his use of black is analogous to strong chiaroscuro. Hideously crashed cars, replicated in multiple from black-and-white photos, cross a green, pink or orange ground.

  101 Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941, photograph.

  Pop art was not, however, strongly given to black. Roy Lichtenstein used hard comic-book colours, while in England Peter Blake, nostalgic for old fairground placards, liked the effect of lurid poster colours faded by English weather. Then, in the later 1960s, Op art came. Black was back, but in a partnership of equal weight with white. In paintings by Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely and Richard Anuszkiewicz, a black-and
-white chequerboard may zigzag and swirl as if seen through water, or contract and spin in herringbone spirals. Op art confirms again the undying beauty of the black-with-white combination. Not that Op art was confined to monochrome: Bridget Riley sometimes gave her slanted grids a dreamcoat beauty of oranges, blues and greens.

  The century’s major use of black-and-white must however be in the photograph: a form born in monochrome, in which for many decades colour was impracticable. Though colour film began to be marketed in 1935–6, by Kodak and by Agfa, the complications of the process meant that black-and-white continued to dominate until 1960. The major historic photographers are mostly known for their work in monochrome – Eugène Atget, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Ansel Adams – and often we find their tones have been managed to make a powerful use of jet-black. Ansel Adams will make blue skies black. In Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, well over half the picture-space is solid black (illus. 101). That sky cannot have been pitch-black, but we read the black here as an endless night-space of crystal-clear air. Against it we relish the wind-streamed white of the distant cloud, stretched out like silk. Near the foreground the tiny crosses shine against the blacks of vegetation; beyond the town there are other black strips of heath and forest. The picture, which has an ‘abstract’ beauty, places human homeliness against the cold, magnificent beauty of the inhuman cosmos.